Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor

Shostakovich’s madcap Piano Concerto No. 1 (1933) started out as a showpiece for trumpet, but gradually morphed into one in which the piano—the composer’s own instrument—takes centre stage. At first hearing, the concerto’s stylistic fast-cutting, knockabout humour, and high-kicking send-ups of Rossini, Beethoven, Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich’s own music appears to make no sense. His composer colleague Nikolai Myaskovsky was stunned by the concerto’s dazzling semantic interchanges, noting in his diary its brilliant iconoclasm. But then one remembers that Shostakovich spent his late teens earning a basic crust playing for silent films in St Petersburg’s larger cinemas. Suddenly, all those harmonic wrong turns, sardonic trumpet fanfares and slapstick delight in vaudeville, music hall, jazz and honky-tonk begin to fall into place. Shostakovich somehow makes a convincing whole out of this musical mayhem, weaving the various cross-references into a four-movement structure.